Filed under: Dave Clarke, Soccer Coaching, Soccer Fitness, Soccer News, Soccer Skills, Soccer Team Management, Soccer Training | Tags: fabregas, passing, small-sided games, vision
There are certain players that I watch and wonder whether I could create for my youth team. These are special players that magically appear on my TV screen and I can be absorbed watching them. The way they play the game leaves others mesmerized in their wake.
Everyone talks about the strikers who can light up the game with one change of pace and in an instant give their team the advantage, but the special players I would like in my team play in midfield and come from Spain. Xavi and Andres Iniesta of Barcelona are outstanding hard working skilful players, but the one I see most of all is Cesc Fabregas.
Fabregas can run a game for the full 90 minutes. At the age of 22 he already has the ability to orchestrate the play of his team-mates. He can force them to change the direction of a run by his own clever pass that exploits space his team mates didn’t even see.
In the same way that Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard runs around doing everything better than anyone else in the team through sheer determination, Fabregas does it with his outstanding understanding of geometrical space.
And I want him in every single one of my teams because that is how I want my teams to play.
Space and vision is something you can coach your team to understand better. They may not be players who impose their own sense of space on their team mates but you can give them a better understanding of how to use space which will benefit your team in the long run. To do this I use a lot of small-sided games which are great to coach young players in how to use space and passing.
Fabregas’s ability was demonstrated by one pass in the 1-0 defeat of Liverpool earlier this month which was over 30 yards and at an angle through a crowd of Liverpool players to the feet of Diaby which showed his awareness and sense of space – Diaby failed to control it otherwise the scoreline would have been greater.
In this clip you can see some of the incredible passes he makes that look so simple but show his amazing vision:
